Freedom Line Blog

These days, the future of free speech looks grim.  However, the WSJ and FantasySCOTUS predict that the government will lose in the pivotal case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Of the 286 predictions, 67 percent believe that the Supreme Court will overrule the D.C. Circuit Court and find that “Hillary: The Movie” is not covered by current campaign finance regulations.  The final verdict: free speech wins.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that these are just predictions and the longer the Court sits on the opinion, the more free speech suffers.

Read more here, here and here.

Unfortunately for taxpayers, patients and health care professionals, the Senate successfully invoked cloture on its health care plan last Saturday.  With only 60 votes needed to proceed to consideration of the bill, Harry Reid got his 60 votes.

Since few Senators likely read the entire 2,074-page piece of legislation, here’s a quick breakdown, courtesy of Senator Coburn, of what was in the bill.

• 8 – new taxes created in the bill.

• 70 – government programs created in the bill.

• 3,607 – uses of the word “shall.”

• 24 million – patients left without health care.

• $494 billion – in new tax hikes.

• $2.5 trillion – total cost of the legislation.

David Boaz – Rhodes Scholars and the Business World
Politico – How Health Care Reform Could Fall Apart
Human Events – Spending Spree a Winning Issue for GOP
Chicago Tribune – NEA’s True Agenda: Power

The Hill – Sen. McCaskill Still Reading Health Bill
WSJ Editorial – The Senate’s Health Care Act
National Review Online – Turbulence Ahead for Health Care
Washington Post – Free Speech is Net Neutrality?

Federal Debt: $12.026 trillion

Senator Ben Nelson, a key conservative Democrat, has announced that he will vote “yea” on the motion to proceed tomorrow.

Part of his statement:

This weekend, I will vote for the motion to proceed to bring that debate onto the Senate floor. The Senate should start trying to fix a health care system that costs too much and delivers too little for Nebraskans.

Throughout my Senate career I have consistently rejected efforts to obstruct. That’s what the vote on the motion to proceed is all about.

According to Politico, this means that the health care bill will likely make it through its first procedural hurdle.  Senator Nelson cited the ability to amend the bill as a reason for his “yea” vote tomorrow, but unless he removes the tax increases, the mandates, the government-run public option, and the thousands of new federal regulations, then any attempt to “amend” the bill will be pointless.

Given his public statement, it’s unlikely that Senator Nelson’s position will change in the next 24 hours, but if you live in Nebraska you can still give him a call and urge him to oppose the Senate’s health care bill.

D.C. Office: 202-224-6551
Kearney Office: 308-293-5918
Lincoln Office: 402-441-4600
Omaha Office: 402-391-3411

You can also call Congress at 202-224-3121 and tell them to vote “No” on tomorrow night’s cloture motion.

New York Times – A Tilt Away from Social Issues
Charles Krauthammer – A Travesty in New York
The Hill – GAO Finds Flaws in Stimulus Data
Washington Examiner – Google-Funded Net Neutrality
Politico – GOP Governors Eye Big 2010 Gains
National Review Online – The Health Care Vote
Roll Call – Report Shows Most Bills Subject to Cloture Pass

Federal Debt: $12.013 trillion

This time, the Senate has scheduled a midnight vote on health care, when the nation will once again be engaging in less destructive activities, like watching college football.

According to Senate sources, the actual vote on cloture will take place around 8:00 this Saturday night.  If the cloture motion garners 60 votes, then it will only take 51 Senators to pass the final version, and all indications are that Democrats have at least 55 votes to pass the health care bill.

The Senate will actually begin its Saturday session in the morning, so citizens have all day to lobby against the largest government takeover of health care in history.

You can call Congress at 202-224-3121 and tell them to vote “No” on the Senate’s health care bill.  Don’t let moderates off of the hook.   A vote for cloture is a vote for final passage of the bill.

Indications are that at least two Democrats are hesitant to support the legislation but it is up to taxpayers across the country to keep the pressure on moderate Senators.

The recently passed House health care bill contains a plethora of tax hikes that would make any nanny-state liberal smile with appreciation.

Perhaps the biggest tax hike, in terms of revenue generation, is the new surtax on “high-income” earners.  However, even most Democrats realize that any new tax on income (amounts over $500,000 and $1 million) must be indexed for inflation to avoid hitting middle-class taxpayers.

If not, taxpayers could experience “bracket creep” similar to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), the inception of which was meant to target literally a few dozen millionaires, but could soon affect over 30 million taxpayers.  If income thresholds don’t change, in the year 2060 a $500,000 annual income won’t be rich but taxpayers will still have to pay both the AMT and the health care surtax.

For example, without changes, the CBO now estimates that “three-quarters of households would pay the AMT.”  The math for the potential surtax is just as frightening.

BlackBook Legal’s Sam Greenberg does the math on the new health care surtax and it’s not pretty.  Eventually, the 5.4% surtax could end up hitting millions of households.  Even if wages grow at the same rate as inflation (unlikely unless the economy continues to stagnate), the surtax will end up hitting at least 5 times as many households as was intended by House leaders.  Greenberg concludes, “A non-inflation linked tax is a convenient way to pass future tax hikes without any legislative action.”

This is just another unintended consequence of federal tax policy.  For those who remain confident that the surtax will eventually be indexed to avoid middle-class taxpayers, just look at the AMT.  Of course, when tax time arrives, you won’t have to look for it; the AMT will find you.

Late last night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid released the newest iteration of health care “reform.”  Seeking to outdo Speaker Pelosi’s 1,990 page bill, Reid’s version measures in at 2,074 pages, longer than War and Peace.  You can read and search through the full version here.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation have released cost estimates of the bill.  Don’t let Senate Democrats fool you, however.  The actual cost of the bill is not $849 billion, mainly because federal subsidies don’t even kick in until 2014.

When fully implemented, the actual cost of Harry Reid’s bill is over $2.5 trillion, from 2014 to 2023.

If you like tax increases, you’ll love the new bill.  It contains over $500 billion in new taxes.  The bill taxes health insurance, Botox, Health Savings Accounts, drug devices, and some employers and employees.  No one escapes Uncle Sam’s scalpel in Harry Reid’s version of “reform.”  Click here for a full list of tax hikes.

More analysis later.

Watertown Daily Times – Hoffman Accuses Democrats of Fraud
Washington Post – Stupak as the Democratic Anti-Hero?
WSJ Editorial – The Phantom Jobs Stimulus
Politico – Senate Health Bill Weighs in at 2,074 pages

National Review Online – Criminalizing Health Care Freedom
USA Today – The $849 Billion Senate Health Care Bill
Karl Rove – The Permanent Campaign Continues
The Hill – Reid Looking for 60 Votes in Senate

Federal Debt: $12.008 trillion

With the Congressional Budget Office set to release its cost estimate of the Senate’s version of health care “reform” sometime this week, taxpayers continue to speculate over the whip count and the prospects for ObamaCare.

Congress.org has set up a virtual prediction market for the health care bill in the Senate.  Click here to make your predictions of ObamaCare’s future.  (Sorry, you can’t make any money off of your predictions.)

Let’s all hope that President Obama and leaders in Congress have a sudden change of heart and decide that more massive government won’t bring down health costs or reduce the federal deficit.

My prediction was 55-45 for final passage, but that doesn’t mean the bill will survive a filibuster attempt.

HT: Political Wire

The chorus of opposition to ObamaCare is growing louder among the ranks of medical academe.  Dr. Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School, says ObamaCare would receive a “failing grade” at Harvard.

He wrote:

Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.

His conclusion:

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system.

The Hill – Republicans to Grill Holder on Gitmo
Politico – How to Pass a Health Bill Fast
Bob Barr – Rand Disciple Spreads Her Word
John Stossel – Worse than Taxes: The Spending

NY Times – Three Democrats Could Block Health Bill in Senate
Washington Post – The GOP Turnabout on Filibusters
WSJ Editorial – The $1.9 Trillion Gimmick
Reuters – California Deficit to Top $21 Billion

Federal Debt Tops $12 trillion

Mike Flynn, editor of Big Government, explains how a few people with a camera brought down ACORN.

HT: reason.tv

Republicans spent the last eight years trying to ensure an up-or-down vote for their judicial nominees.  Democrats, for the first time in history, decided to take the extraordinary step of filibustering all of the nominees that they deemed “out of the judicial mainstream.”

The Democratic standard for mainstream: ‘We don’t like them and we’ll do everything possible to keep them off the bench.’

Now, Democrats are having problems with the judicial confirmation process, even though they hold 60 seats in the U.S. Senate.

Today the Senate will hold a cloture vote on the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.  Senate Republicans are currently mulling political payback and will likely filibuster Judge Hamilton’s nomination.  If successful, Hamilton’s nomination will wind up just like dozens of blocked judges during the Bush Administration.

It appears that Democrats, too, have a problem with judges.  What goes around comes around in Washington, D.C.

The government can’t manage to control the laws of economics like it used to.

No surprise here, but according to a new study released by the non-partisan Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies, the House health care bill will increase health care costs by $289 billion in the next ten years.

As much as the White House talked about “bending the health care cost curve” downward, the House health care bill, H.R.3962, does the exact opposite.

For some reason the Administration can’t understand that more government spending on health care without commensurate gains in supply leads to health care inflation, driving up costs for all consumers.

Other highlights from the report:

By calendar year 2019, the mandates, coupled with the Medicaid expansion, would reduce the number of uninsured from 57 million, as projected under current law, to an estimated 23 million under H.R. 3962.

The estimated effects of H.R. 3962 on overall national health expenditures (NHE) are shown in table 5. In aggregate, we estimate that for calendar years 2010 through 2019 NHE would increase by $289 billion, or 0.8 percent, over the updated baseline projection that was released on June 29, 2009… The NHE share of GDP is projected to be 21.1 percent in 2019, compared to 20.8 percent under current law.

Public spending would increase under H.R. 3962 as a result of the expansion of the Medicaid program and other Medicaid changes, less the net Medicare savings under the bill. Private expenditures would be higher as well…

Washington Post – Health Bill Would Reduce Senior Care
National Review Online – Great Headlines for ObamaCare
Reuters – Senate Won’t Rush Health Bill
Real Clear Politics – Government Health Care Will Leave Us Broke

New York Times – Unemployment is Off the Chart
Clive Crook – American Dream Needs Repair
The Hill – Conservatives Split over Judicial Filibuster
Politico – Charlie Crist Loses His Mojo

Federal Debt: $11.994 trillion

Well, not yet.  But this week Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Doug Elmendorf issued a sobering report on the state of the nation’s finances.

The largest problem by far?  Entitlements … those “popular” little nuggets of government largesse that everyone enjoys receiving but no one (maybe some liberals) enjoys paying for out of their paycheck.  For example, Medicare and Medicaid are projected to grow by 80% over the next 25 years, while Social Security will only grow 20%.

As Elmendorf notes, the nation simply can’t continue to run up the national debt, currently at almost $12 trillion.  He alludes to possible crises down the road: a drastic drop in the dollar, an increase in interest rates and massive tax hikes.

His conclusion:

[F]iscal policy is on an unsustainable path to an extent that cannot be solved by minor tinkering. The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services the people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services. That fundamental disconnect will have to be addressed in some way if the budget is to be placed on a sustainable course.

This one is from James Capretta over at The New Atlantis, a technology and science journal, is a must read.

Capretta highlights why the federal government will never be able to truly “bend the cost curve” on health care.

Here is the link and a few highlights:

Obamacare is predicated on the assumption that the federal government has the knowledge, capacity, and will to drive greater efficiency in American health care. Inadvertently, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has become an articulate spokesman for why that assumption is dead wrong.

Emanuel blames the limits of politics. “Let’s be honest,” Emanuel apparently stated in a recent interview. “The goal isn’t to see whether I can pass this through the executive board of the Brookings Institution. I’m passing it through the United State Congress with people who represent constituents.” That’s exactly right of course. But it’s also an indictment of the entire Obamacare enterprise. The health-care bills under consideration would hand over to the federal government nearly all power for organizing American health care. And yet there is not a shred of evidence that Congress or the administration can handle these tasks well.

The only way to slow the pace of rising costs without sacrificing quality is by building a functioning marketplace, with cost-conscious consumers driving the allocation of resources. The government must play an important oversight role in such a marketplace. But if we rely on politicians, or even commissions that answer to them, for cost control, what we will get is lower quality, not more efficiency.

HT: Greg Mankiw

WSJ – Sneak Peak at Palin’s “Going Rogue”
Political Wire – Obama to Focus on Deficit Reduction
Peggy Noonan – Just the Facts, Mr. President
New York Review of Books – Who Are the Blue Dogs?
National Review Online – Spending the Holidays with Harry Reid

The Hill – White House Counsel to Resign
Politico – 9/11 Suspects to be Tried in NY
PC World – Experts Worry about Net Neutrality Rules

Federal Debt: $11.922 trillion

Spitzer to Lecture at Harvard Ethics Center

I’m not sure what’s more troubling, that Spitzer would agree to lecture on ethics, or that the Harvard Ethics Center would invite him to do so.

More from the Boston Globe:

Spitzer, a Harvard Law School alumnus, left office in March 2008 after it become public that he frequented an upscale prostitution service.

The madam who says she supplied Spitzer with high priced escorts for five years wrote a letter to the ethics center objecting to Spitzer’s speech because as New York attorney general he broke the same laws he enforced.

“I am greatly intrigued as to what Mr. Spitzer could contribute to an ethical discussion when as Chief Executive Law Enforcement Officer of NY he broke numerous laws for which he has yet to be punished,” the madam, Kristin Davis, wrote in the letter, which is posted on her website. “As Attorney General he went around arresting and making examples out of the same escort agencies he was frequenting.”